Dave Alvin, Jimmie Dale Gilmore team on 'Billy the Kid and Geronimo'

The Americana artists have a long history but are collaborating for the first time, which includes an album due June 1.

Written by By Randy Lewis

Two Americana music veterans whose paths have crossed for nearly half a century - even before they knew each other - are teaming up for their first recording as a duo, a project that brings Southern California native Dave Alvin together with esteemed West Texas singer-songwriter Jimmie Dale Gilmore.

The pair recently joined forces to record the forthcoming album "Downey to Lubbock," the title referring to their hometowns. The Times premiered one of the new collection's original songs, "Billy the Kid and Geronimo," about an imagined meeting between the two 19th century outlaws whose lives became the stuff of legend in the American West. You can listen at lat.ms/downeytolubbock.

"I thought Jimmie and I needed something to sing together," Alvin, 62, said in an interview shortly after getting home from a recent round of tour dates with Gilmore, who is a decade older. "I'd had the song in pieces. Usually when I write the semi-historical mythical songs, there's at least five other verses laying around - like old folks songs themselves.

"I write in a flurry, then go back and say, 'We don't need this, we don't need that, we don't need to know what color his socks were," he said with a laugh. "I like it. Of course, it's historically inaccurate because it never happened. I like dialogues about archetypes and guilt and all that."

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Alvin tackles the vocals for the lines expressing the imagined views of Billy the Kid, aka William Bonney, aka William Henry McCarty Jr., the young gunslinger infamous for killing 21 people who was famously shot to death at age 21 by Sheriff Pat Garrett.

Gilmore, who is part Native American, voices the thoughts Alvin wrote for Geronimo, the Chiricahua Apache chief who was one of the last Native American leaders to abandon his resistance against white colonization of the American Southwest:

"Billy the Kid said, 'We're just the same/We're cursed and we're damned as they whisper our names.' "

"Geronimo said, 'No, we're not the same/For the harm I have done, I feel great shame/But we'll pay the same price for the blood on our hands.' "

"He's got native blood on both sides, and I guess I was a kid at one time, so there you go," he said.

The album is due June 1, the same day they start a joint tour in Houston. The trek will occupy them for most of June and July.

"I first met Jimmie probably 27 years ago, maybe more," Alvin said. "Tom Russell (another former LA-based singer-songwriter( had put together a songwriter-traveling-circus kind of show with Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale" - who had played together with Joe Ely in the fabled 1970s West Texas trio the Flatlanders - "and Tom and me and Steve Young and Katy Moffatt. As we rolled along with picked up Lucinda Williams and some other folks.

"I'd heard of him, mentioned in a kind of whispered status, but when we met, I discovered he was a really nice guy, and we kind of clicked," Alvin said. "There were certain complexities to him musically that took a while to figure out. Like I knew he was influenced in many ways by blues stuff. A couple of years after that, I heard him pull out a Blind Lemon Jefferson number. There are not many people who do Blind Lemon."

Alvin discovered later that the two of them had been hanging around the 1960s LA folk-blues club the Ash Grove during the same period and likely attended some of the same shows, unknown to each other.

"I probably came up to his belt buckle at that point," Alvin said, acknowledging how he and his older brother, Phil, had started seeking out celebrated folk and blues musicians when they were still passionate teenage music fans from Downey.

"There's a Lightnin' Hopkins song on the album because Jimmie had heard Lightnin' do it at the Ash Grove," he said, referencing "Buddy Brown's Blues." "He dropped that one in one night onstage, and when I picked my jaw off the floor, we started talking and figured we might have been there at the same time."

That would have occurred well before the Alvins formed their high-octane roots music band, the Blasters.

They also included "Seven Bridges Road" writer Young's song "Silverlake" and found out each felt a sense of proprietary connection to the song, which Young wrote about the neighborhood adjacent to Echo Park, where Young and Alvin once lived.